They Are Coming for Your Birth Control: Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned… and Need Monistat

Note: Think that anti-choice politicians and activists aren’t trying to outlaw contraception? Think again. Follow along in an ongoing series that proves beyond a doubt that they really are coming for your birth control.

Wausau, Wisconsin, doesn’t have a clinic that provides abortion services. But that doesn’t mean anti-choice protesters in the community are willing to bypass the tradition that is the “40 Days for Life” vigil, a twice-yearly event where religious advocates try to pray to “end abortion.”

No, in Wausau, they simply took their protest to the sidewalk in front of Family Planning Services. Those services? Birth control, WIC distribution, STI screenings.

The anxious girl hides her face, painfully aware someone passing by may recognize her, but she bravely trudges past the protesters. Some merely stare at her accusingly. Others hiss words meant to shame her. She wants to run away, but she has no money, and there is nowhere else she can go for help. Hers is a torment that cannot be prayed away. Her eyes fill with tears, but she refuses to let them fall. She keeps her gaze on the entrance; five more steps, three, two. One more step and a push of the door and this nightmare will be over. Inside she will find medical help. She will find compassion without judgment. After weeks of suffering, of tossing and turning and worrying about what she was going to do, the teen is about to find someone who will help her end her unwanted……… yeast infection.

State financing of Family Planning Health Services isn’t just a failed policy, however. It’s also a policy that encourages illegal behavior. The age of sexual consent in Wisconsin is 16. Yet FPHS proudly distributes contraception to kids as young as 15.

Look at it this way: if you sold cigarettes to kids younger than 18, you’d be prosecuted. If you sold a shotgun to the same kids, you’d be prosecuted.

But when Family Planning Health Services facilitates sex for kids under 16, it’s rewarded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wisconsin’s taxpayers. In no other situation do Wisconsin taxpayers fund organizations that promote and facilitate criminal activity.

Thank goodness the 40 Days vigils are over. Now teens can get treatment for their vaginal discharge unencumbered. Well, until April, that is, when it will all start again.

Whew, for a second I thought they were actually protesting Monistat. Though the clinic thing is bad enough. How dare women think they have a right to see a doctor?

It’s sad that they’ve become so extreme that I could actually see them doing such a thing.

coralsea

Yes — but I expect that some of them would probably say that a girl who needs Monistat probably needs it because she has been engaged in illicit activities “down there.”

When I was 14 I got a yeast infection and my mother was furious and condemning. She occasionally got yeast infections — and assumed that they had to be from sex. I will still never forget the look on her face when the doctor advised her that, in my case (and probably hers), my yeast infection probably stemmed from wearing heavy-duty underpants (these horrible things she got from England) under my pajamas, explaining that, for good health, that “area” needed to “breathe,” at least at night. He also suggested that it was kinda dumb to force me to wear a bra at night, too, but my mother was adamant that, once you started getting breasts, they had to be “controlled” at all times.

My mother continued to be plagued by yeast infections and UTIs, probably in part because her refusal to dispense with the heavy, nighttime undergarments. As for me — I have slept in the buff ever since (I can slip on a night gown in seconds if a fire breaks out — my mother’s excuse for “controlled” breast and properly harnessed “bottom areas”). I can’t imagine going back to sleeping “in bondage” (meaning in jammies) again.

Sorry — I don’t mean to be flip about these anti-choicers. It is ridiculous that they can be allowed to initimidate girls and women who are seeking basic services. But the whole Monistat/shame issue just brought back memories of a once mortifying (and now just pathetic) experience.